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6 Responses

Canonical tends to be the easiest/quickest method to address these issues. The main difference is that with a 301 the user and the search engine experience the same thing. Whereas with a canonical a user could still access the duplicate page - which in some cases might not be the best user experience. Also, Bing does not follow the directive of a canonical tag.

The first thumbs down was not me. I thought maybe that I did it on accident so I pushed it again thinking it would negate it, but it added another thumbs down. So Im pretty sure the first one was not me....unless ur allowed to thumbs down twice....

I will try to find a way to undo the thumbs down i did on accident.

Sorry about that and I definitely do appreciate your willingness to help. I am not sure who gave u the thumbs down

301 redirects basically tell browsers (and search engines) - "Hey this page no longer exists at this URL it is now located here" statistically, you also lose 1-10% of link juice when you 301 redirect a page, and, for duplicate content issues, should be avoided unless it's absolutely necessary.

The rel=canonical tag, however, is a way to tell search engines the preferred version of a given URL. The good thing about this is that you don't lose link juice, and generally it is the least intrusive way to implement a fix to duplicate content issues.

If you were to implement a 301 redirect, you'd have to consider that all of these URLs are different (duplicate content wise) and would need a redirect implemented to a single url:

http://domain.com/sample-page

http://domain.com/sample-page/

http://domain.com/Sample-Page

http://domain.com/Sample-Page/

etc...etc...etc...

You can see that it can get tedius. By setting <link rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/sample-page/" /> will get you the desired results much easier, than implementing tons of 301s.

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